Month

January 2016

The article explains how technology can enhance the learning environment for those students with autism and other needs. The teacher used palm pilots for her students. First, the article mentions that her students were supposed to take pictures of their pets and share them with another classmate, teaching social skills. It was also mentioned that students could program appropriate responses to various social settings, which is especially useful to students with social communication disorder or those with social anxiety. Students are also able to put in their classes, homework, and due dates to keep them organized, which I think all students could benefit from, not merely those with special needs. The PalmPilot also assists students write down question prompts and take notes, which helps in organization and better understand the material. There is also a story in which a student with autism found switching classes as a freshmen and encountering various teachers overwhelming, so his brother, who had an affinity for vlogging, recorded his bother’s routine and provided a commentary for him. By watching the recording over and over again, he felt more comfortable with his new routine.

I think the integrating of technology into classrooms is a fantastic idea. Not only do students with special needs benefit from assistive technology, but it can help other students in innumerable ways as well. However, after today’s class discussion on funding, I can’t help but feel students in low-income schools suffer from the lack of funding for technology. Its so unfair that not every student is able to benefit from the technology that could help them achieve so much more academically as well as socially.

This article, from edutopia, has five incredibly helpful teaching strategies. I loved the idea of formative assessment, which gives us an idea of what our students are grasping, what they are struggling with, and even evaluate how we teach based on what worked well and what did not. Formative assessment allows adjustments to be made and everyone, students and teachers, to track progress instead of waiting until the end of a unit to test.

Also, feedback is another strategy that I found incredibly useful. I think papers should be given feedback in a conference setting. Too often English teachers write corrections in the margins or draw arrows, but do our students always know what our notes mean? Could we have not processed what our student actually was trying to say? I also think it is also important, as the article mentions, that we allow our students to give us feedback as well.